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Friday, July 22, 2016

Tennis For Fitness

I've started taking tennis lessons! I have been wanting to learn tennis skills for a couple of years but have always found a reason to say I was too busy to add in another activity. Finally I bought a tennis outfit. That motivated me to sign up!The best active sports are the ones that you can enjoy your entire life. According to a
meta-analysis published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine,
tennis is a good fitness fit for almost anyone because of its wide range
of health benefits across the age spectrum. Perhaps most interesting were the conclusions reached
based on a study of more than 1,000 students in medical school between
1948 and 1964. At the start, the students were asked to rate their
ability in tennis, golf, football, baseball and basketball.
Researchers assessed these students again 22 years later and then again
40 years later and found that tennis was the only sport in which a
greater ability during medical school was associated with a lower risk
of cardiovascular disease. Researchers credit this benefit to the fact that tennis was the sport played most often through midlife.

Rev up fat-burning
Exercise performance physician Massimo Testa lists tennis as a good
choice for moderate aerobic exercise, but his new research takes it up a
notch. It notes that singles
tennis can provide a vigorous workout, and ranks it among the top five
activities in terms of energy expenditure — higher than swimming,
rowing, weightlifting, Jazzercise, hiking or golf.

Strengthen your bones.
In study after study, tennis
was found to bolster bone strength in both genders and in all ages. Those who
started playing at a young age showed a stronger correlation than those
who started at an older age, but healthier bones were maintained even
after players decreased their participation.

Streamline coordination
In an analysis of the
impact of aging on coordination using tennis players and non-players 20
to 80, non-players showed an increasing decline in their ability to
respond with advancing age, while tennis players showed no decline in
response at different ages. Researchers cited evidence that in honing
focus, tennis outperforms golf, running, weight lifting, inline skating
and downhill skiing.